Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  The problem was, it soon became apparent that Eric wasn’t even really a duct taper. He was a box ticker: one partner had insisted on the project, and, rather than argue with him, the others pretended to agree. Then they did everything in their power to make sure it didn’t work.

  Eric: I should have realized that this was one partner’s idea that no one else actually wanted to implement. Why else would they be paying a twenty-one-year-old history graduate with no IT experience to do this? They’d bought the cheapest software they could find, from a bunch of absolute crooks, so it was buggy, prone to crashing, and looked like a Windows 3.1 screen saver. The entire workforce was paranoid that it was designed to monitor their productivity, record their keystrokes, or flag that they were torrenting porn on the company internet, and so they wanted nothing to do with it. As I had absolutely no background in coding or software development, there was very little I could do to improve the thing, so I was basically tasked with selling and managing a badly functioning, unwanted turd. After a few months, I realized that there was very little for me to do at all most days, aside from answer a few queries from confused designers wanting to know how to upload a file, or search for someone’s email on the address book.

  The utter pointlessness of his situation soon led to subtle—and then, increasingly unsubtle—acts of rebellion:

  Eric: I started arriving late and leaving early. I extended the company policy of “a pint on Friday lunchtime” into “pints every lunchtime.” I read novels at my desk. I went out for lunchtime walks that lasted three hours. I almost perfected my French reading ability, sitting with my shoes off with a copy of Le Monde and a Petit Robert. I tried to quit, and my boss offered me a £2,600 raise, which I reluctantly accepted. They needed me precisely because I didn’t have the skills to implement something that they didn’t want to implement, and they were willing to pay to keep me. (Perhaps one could paraphrase Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: to forestall their fears of alienation from their own labor, they had to sacrifice me up to a greater alienation from potential human growth.)

  As time went on, Eric became more and more flagrant in his defiance, hoping he could find something he could do that might actually cause him to be fired. He started showing up to work drunk and taking paid “business trips” for nonexistent meetings:

  Eric: A colleague from the Edinburgh office, to whom I had poured out my woes when drunk at the annual general meeting, started to arrange phony meetings with me, once on a golf course near Gleneagles, me hacking at the turf in borrowed golf shoes two sizes too large. After getting away with that, I started arranging fictional meetings with people in the London office. The firm would put me up in a nicotine-coated room in the St. Athans in Bloomsbury, and I would meet old London friends for some good old-fashioned all-day drinking in Soho pubs, which often turned into all-night drinking in Shoreditch. More than once, I returned to my office the following Monday in last Wednesday’s work shirt. I’d long since stopped shaving, and by this point, my hair looked like it was robbed from a Zeppelin roadie. I tried on two more occasions to quit, but both times my boss offered me more cash. By the end, I was being paid a stupid sum for a job that, at most, involved me answering the phone twice a day. I eventually broke down on the platform of Bristol Temple Meads train station one late summer’s afternoon. I’d always fancied seeing Bristol, and so I decided to “visit” the Bristol office to look at “user take-up.” I actually spent three days taking MDMA at an anarcho-syndicalist house party in St. Pauls, and the dissociative comedown made me realize how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.

  After heroic efforts, Eric did finally manage to get himself replaced:

  Eric: Eventually, responding to pressure, my boss hired a junior fresh out of a computer science degree to see if some improvements could be made to our graphical user interface. On this kid’s first day at work, I wrote him a list of what needed to be done—and then immediately wrote my resignation letter, which I posted under my boss’s door when he took his next vacation, surrendering my last paycheck over the telephone in lieu of the statutory notice period. I flew that same week to Morocco to do very little in the coastal town of Essaouira. When I came back, I spent the next six months living in a squat, growing my own vegetables on three acres of land. I read your Strike! piece when it first came out. It might have been a revelation for some that capitalism creates unnecessary jobs in order for the wheels to merely keep on turning, but it wasn’t to me.

  The remarkable thing about this story is that many would consider Eric’s a dream job. He was being paid good money to do nothing. He was also almost completely unsupervised. He was given respect and every opportunity to game the system. Yet despite all that, it gradually destroyed him.

  Why?

  To a large degree, I think, this is really a story about social class. Eric was a young man from a working-class background—a child of factory workers, no less—fresh out of college and full of expectations, suddenly confronted with a jolting introduction to the “real world.” Reality, in this instance, consisted of the fact that (a) while middle-aged executives can be counted on to simply assume that any twentysomething white male will be at least something of a computer whiz (even if, as in this case, he had no computer training of any kind), and (b) might even grant someone like Eric a cushy situation if it suited their momentary purposes, (c) they basically saw him as something of a joke. Which his job almost literally was. His presence in the company was very close to a practical joke some designers were playing on one another.

  Even more, what drove Eric crazy was the fact there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose. He couldn’t even tell himself he was doing it to feed his family; he didn’t have one yet. Coming from a background where most people took pride in making, maintaining, and fixing things, or anyway felt that was the sort of thing people should take pride in, he had assumed that going to university and moving into the professional world would mean doing the same sorts of thing on a grander, even more meaningful, scale. Instead, he ended up getting hired precisely for what he wasn’t able to do. He tried to just resign. They kept offering him more money. He tried to get himself fired. They wouldn’t fire him. He tried to rub their faces in it, to make himself a parody of what they seemed to think he was. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

  To get a sense of what was really happening here, let us imagine a second history major—we can refer to him as anti-Eric—a young man of a professional background but placed in exactly the same situation. How might anti-Eric have behaved differently? Well, likely as not, he would have played along with the charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms of self-annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate social capital, connections that would eventually allow him to move on to better things. He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. Eric, who had not been trained to act and think this way, couldn’t bring himself to do it. As a result, he ended up, for a time, at least, in a squat growing tomatoes.2

  concerning the experience of falseness and purposelessness at the core of bullshit jobs, and the importance now felt of conveying the experience of falseness and purposelessness to youth

  In a deeper way, Eric’s story brings together almost everything that those with bullshit jobs say is distressing about their situation. It’s not just the purposelessness—though certainly, it’s that. It’s also the falseness. I’ve already mentioned the indignation telemarketers feel when they are forced to try to trick or pressure people into doing something they think is against their best interests. This is a complicated feeling. We don’t even really have a name for it. When we think of scams, after all, we think of grifters, confidence artist
s; they are easy to see as romantic figures, rebels living by their wits, as well as admirable because they have achieved a certain form of mastery. This is why they make acceptable heroes in Hollywood movies. A confidence artist could easily take delight in what she’s doing. But being forced to scam someone is altogether different. In such circumstances, it’s hard not to feel you’re ultimately in the same situation as the person you’re scamming: you’re both being pressured and manipulated by your employer, only in your case, with the added indignity that you’re also betraying the trust of someone whose side you should be on.

  One might imagine the feelings sparked by most bullshit jobs would be very different. After all, if the employee is scamming anyone, it’s his employer, and he’s doing it with his employer’s full consent. But somehow, this is precisely what many report to be so disturbing about the situation. You don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing you’re putting something over on someone. You’re not even living your own lie. Most of the time, you’re not even quite living somebody else’s lie, either. Your job is more like a boss’s unzippered fly that everyone can see but also knows better than to mention.

  If anything, this appears to compound the sense of purposelessness.

  Perhaps anti-Eric would, indeed, have found a way to turn around that purposelessness and seen himself as in on the joke; perhaps if he were a real go-getter, he’d have used his administrative skills to effectively take over the office; but even children of the rich and powerful often find this difficult to pull off. The following testimony gives a sense of the moral confusion they can often feel:

  Rufus: I got the job because my dad was a Vice President at the company. I was charged with handling complaints. Given that it was (in name) a biomedical company, all returned product was considered a biohazard. So I was able to spend a lot of time in a room all by myself, with no supervision and essentially no work to do. The bulk of my memory of the job involves either playing Minesweeper or listening to podcasts.

  I did spend hours poring over spreadsheets, tracking changes on Word documents, etc., but I guarantee you that I contributed nothing to this company. I spent every minute at the office wearing headphones. I paid only the smallest attention possible to the people around me and the “work” I was assigned.

  I hated every minute working there. In fact, more days than not, I went home early from work, took two- or three-hour lunch breaks, spent hours “in the bathroom” (wandering around), and nobody ever said a word. I was compensated for every minute.

  Thinking back on it, it was kind of a dream job.

  Retrospectively, Rufus understands that he got a ridiculously sweet deal—he seems rather baffled, actually, why he hated the job so much at the time. But surely he couldn’t have been entirely unaware of how his coworkers must have seen him: boss’s kid getting paid to goof off; feels he’s too good to talk to them; supervisors clearly informed “hands off.” It could hardly have evoked warm feelings.

  Still, this story raises another question: If Rufus’s father didn’t actually expect his son to do the job, why did he insist he take it in the first place? He could presumably just as easily have given his son an allowance, or, alternately, assigned him a job that needed doing, coached him on his duties, and taken some minimal effort to make sure those tasks were actually carried out. Instead, he seems to have felt it was more important for Rufus to be able to say he had a job than to actually acquire work experience.3

  That’s puzzling. It’s all the more puzzling because the father’s attitude appears to be extremely common. It wasn’t always so. There was once a time when most students in college whose parents could afford it, or who qualified for scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to pursue other forms of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art. Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, like Rufus they’re barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so. A number of students wrote just to complain to me about this phenomenon. Here Patrick reflects on his job as a casual retail assistant in a student union convenience store:

  Patrick: I didn’t actually need the job (I was getting by financially without it), but after some pressure from my family, I applied for it out of some warped sense of obligation to get experience in work to prepare me for whatever lay ahead beyond university. In reality, the job just took away time and energy from other activities I had been doing, like campaigning and activism, or reading for pleasure, which I think made me resent it even more.

  The job was pretty standard for a student union convenience store and involved serving people on the till (could have easily been done by a machine) with the explicitly stated requirement, in my performance review after my trial period, that I “should be more positive and happy when serving customers.” So not only did they want me to do work that could have been performed by a machine just as effectively, they wanted me to pretend that I was enjoying that state of affairs.

  It was just about bearable if my shift was during lunchtime, when it got really busy, so time went by relatively quickly. Being on shift on a Sunday afternoon when nobody frequented the SU was just appalling. They had this thing about us not being able to just do nothing, even if the shop was empty. So we couldn’t just sit at the till and read a magazine. Instead, the manager made up utterly meaningless work for us to do, like going round the whole shop and checking that things were in date (even though we knew for a fact they were because of the turnover rate) or rearranging products on shelves in even more pristine order than they already were.

  The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think, because the work was so lacking in any intellectual demand. So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive. I couldn’t stop thinking about how miserable it made me.

  This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves. Parents now feel it is important that young minds should have this experience. But what, precisely, was Patrick supposed to be learning through this exercise?

  Here’s another example:

  Brendan: I’m at a small college in Massachusetts training to be a high school history teacher. Recently I started work at the dining commons.

  A coworker told me on my first day: “Half of this job is making things look clean, and the other half is looking busy.”

  For the first couple of months, they had me “monitor” the back room. I would clean the buffet slider, restock the desserts, and wipe down tables when people left. It’s not a big room, so usually I could do all my tasks in five minutes out of every thirty. I ended up being able to get a lot of reading for my coursework done.

  However, sometimes one of the less understanding supervisors would be working. In that case, I would have to keep the corner of my eye open at all times in order to make sure they would always see me acting busy. I have no idea why the job description couldn’t just acknowledge that I wouldn’t have much to do—if I didn’t have to spend so much time and energy looking busy, I could get my reading and the table cleaning done quicker and more efficiently.

  But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are simply talking about teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing would be to leave them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in every sense except that you don’t get paid for it (though if you’re r
eceiving a scholarship or an allowance, you actually are getting paid for it). In fact, like almost all the other activities Patrick or Brendan might have been engaged in had they not been obliged to take on “real world” jobs, their classwork is actually more real than the largely make-work projects they ended up being forced to do. Schoolwork has real content. One must attend classes, do the readings, write exercises or papers, and be judged on the results. But in practical terms, this appears to be exactly what makes schoolwork appear inadequate to those authorities—parents, teachers, governments. administrators—who have all come to feel that they must also teach students about the real world. It’s too results-oriented. You can study any way you want to so long as you pass the test. A successful student has to learn self-discipline, but this is not the same as learning how to operate under orders. Of course, the same is true of most of the other projects and activities students might otherwise be engaged in: whether rehearsing for plays, playing in a band, political activism, or baking cookies or growing pot to sell to fellow students. All of which might be appropriate training for a society of self-employed adults, or even one made up primarily of the largely autonomous professionals (doctors, lawyers, architects, and so forth) that universities were once designed to produce. It might even be appropriate to train young people for the democratically organized collectives that were the subject of Patrick’s reveries about full communism. But as Brendan points out, it is very much not preparation for work in today’s increasingly bullshitized workplace: